Category: Life

I read with interest an article in which Stephen Hawking expressed concern that any visit from an Alien race may not have peaceful intentions, likening any visitation with the impact that humans have inflicted on each other when colonizing other countries.

Though I hate to disagree, I feel that he may be incorrect in his assumption that any alien race would want to conquer the planet, they may want to ‘show us the way’, which to us, the comparatively primitive race may feel a lot like the North American Indians felt when we educated them regarding Christianity.

However I hope that any advanced race has already gone through a logical next step in terms of evolution and would be a lot more understanding of us than we were when we forced our religion and our culture onto what we considered the ‘savages’.

The logical step that I am talking about is not physical, but mental.

If we are to reach for the stars, as the alien race that Hawking is considering, then we, humanity, needs to work together.

The current ‘mess’ that we are in proves that we are not very good at that. The rich are rich and the poor, well, the poor do not matter.

If we are going to reach for the stars, or just really get much further along as a society, then we need to work as a single population towards those common goals.

This means that we need to look beyond political and religious divisions and do the ‘right thing’, rather than the thing that inconvenience us personally the least.

The state that I live in is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, during the housing boom and the associated spending frenzy the state committed to improving roads, building new buildings and vast amounts of pet projects. This spending is mostly spent now and the state is in a huge budget crisis.

The solution to the crisis is simple, we, as a state, need to balance the expenditure with the income available, plus we need to ensure that we have adequate reserves.

This is incredibly obvious.

Read More

The word ‘geek’ used to be an insult, perhaps it is becoming so again ?

A few days ago I was asked to look at a pair of computers that belong to a’ friend. The two machines are HP’s, an elderly, but still really nicely functional laptop and a fairly new desktop.

Both machines had been used by ‘children’ and as such, they had teenagitis, multiple copies of ‘extorsionware’, out-of-date anti-virus and every ‘free game’ known to man.

In other words, they are a pair of machines that are owned by people that are less than computer savvy.

The laptop was pretty easy to deal with, booting an OEM copy of XP and using the installation codes on the label affixed to the underside had it up and running quickly, hp.com relinquished the drivers for the wi-fi and 18,197 updates later I installed Microsoft’s Security Essentials and all was good.

Read More

Today is the last day of my enforced ‘vacation’, I have an official start date of ‘Thursday” for my new job.

It has been a bit of an adventure to say the least. The day before the lay-off I applied for a job at a company that is fairly close to my old office, the position sounded interesting and the company looks strong and forward thinking. I heard nothing. I interviewed elsewhere and found that although there are jobs out there, there are few that really excited me. In the suddenly busy days and changed routines I completely forgot about the job that I had applied for.

Now at this point I suggest that you read back a little more, one of the first things I did when faced with job hunting was to re-write my resume. The prior version was rambling and full of way too many detailed descriptions. I read somewhere that the average recruiter will merely glance at a resume and scan it for applicable skills, so the absolute best way to get their attention is to use simple, short, concise prose and perhaps lots of bullets. Knowing that given the chance I can sit and write a novel when a simple yes/no is needed, you can probably understand when I say that my resume was more like a bound volume than a couple of page introduction to my career.

So I carefully re-wrote it and created a format that I felt was eye catching enough to get noticed, but not so much that it was for all the wrong reasons, I did leave out the fluffy bunnies, but the cool font and clever layout remained. I had a set of great interviews at a small company that I felt went well, but no offer other than ‘you are #1’ was forthcoming, they expanded their search, but I remained #1, but they are still looking elsewhere.

The level of interest in my newly concise resume was substantial, quickly, including a call from an agency in Florida. I nearly ignored the message because I did not understand half of it – a combination of a quick talker and a bad line nearly conspired to kill it dead.

As soon as I spoke to the caller, Donna, I realized that this was a very, very good opportunity and potentially a very, very good fit. I e-mailed her a clean version of my resume and then things started to happen, quickly.

At some point I realized that I had applied for this job about a month previous !

I interviewed on the phone a couple of days later and once more felt that the opportunity was extremely good. I also felt that I had ‘clicked’. Very quickly I was called in and spent several hours over two days talking with potential colleagues. Then it was a question of getting the offer out and accepted and background checks etc.

So I start tomorrow, which is great. I have spent way too much time fiddling with the suspension on the MINI and re-writing css for my web sites and changing hosts for cncpics.com….

I spent some time today sorting out my music collection. It was a mess with a lot of duplicates and even missing files, thankfully all of our music is stored on the server, so my personal collection, which resides on an internal disk that is accessible from both Windows and Linux (iTunes and Rhythm Box) is merely a subset of the main library.

So any missing files are at least accessible.

Booting into Windows and using iTunes to manage the music makes some sense due to the ease of use of the application and the extra facilities over RB. The major advantage is that drag and drop will simply copy and catalogue files and place them into the correct structure.

However my quad core 64Bit 8GB machine actually struggles to run iTunes at a decent rate, adding or deleting more than a couple of hundred files in a single hit it will report that it is out of memory. Secondly there is little to no scripting abilities in Vista compared to Linux.

After a couple of hours of frustration, performance issues and more frustration I switched to the land of $ prompts.

To find missing files I simply compared the number of files in the album folders using ls – | grep wc -l (number of lines) and then also looked for dupes with a few simple grep’s.

Once I had the missing and dupes under a reasonable level of control I started to look at the albums that I had in the collection and deleted ones that I do not want.

Again this was easier from the file manager than from RB (or iTunes).

Cleaning up this way reduced my local storage nicely and made sure that I only had whole albums (or CD singles) as far as possible. Running RB to show the results and to sync with my iPhone was pretty gratifying.

It also sparked a memory.

I rarely listen to the radio, but one morning a few months ago I was using ooTunes to listen to BBC Radio 1, a British pop channel and they played a track called ‘Paper Planes by a band called MIA when I heard it I bought the album on iTunes within a few minutes. The song was oddly familiar but I could not for the life of me figure out where I had heard it. Until today.

It turns out that I already had the song, albeit in a massively re-mixed form as it is used in Slumdog Millionaire, one of my favorite movies of last year.

How do I know this ?

There was a missing track in the Slumdog OST folder and my script highlighted it.

Somehow my brain had made the link when I had heard the un-remixed version on the ‘radio’ hence the familiarity.

I really prefer the original version over the remix though.

Now if only I could use this association and recognition skill for something useful…..

Oh and at the end of the scripting and messing, I booted back into Vista and imported the new library back into the iTunes library and all was well in the world…..